Translated From the Gibberish: Seven Stories and One Half Truth

The math of Translated From the Gibberish, accomplished Vancouver-based dramatist and novelist Anosh Irani’s collection of short narrative works, presents a minor puzzle.

Subtitled “Seven Stories and One Half Truth,” the volume sandwiches six pieces of fiction between Part One and Part Two of the essayistic title piece, rendering that two-parter simultaneously “story” and “half truth.” That blurring, depending on point of view, might be confusing or a statement about genre classifications that’s worthy of meditation.

The first section of “Translated” concludes with an invitation for readers to “follow the bridge, or pass over” it until the essay’s second half 170 pages later. This bridge, then, is composed of the six stories, set largely in India and Canada. Although generally lighter in spirit than The Parcel, Irani’s terrific if harrowing novel of 2016, they’re still masterfully narrated and sobering vignettes that portray characters whose surroundings or upbringings have led to a stasis they strive to overcome — with varying degrees of success, of course.

Irani’s scenarios have an intriguing, dramatic immediacy. For example, in “Butter Chicken” Sujoy, a celebrity chef, appears on a television program in New York to prepare an “authentic” Indian meal. That request for authenticity leads him to recall a domineering father (“His father abhorred anything that walked, moved, made sounds, had life, a heart, a soul”) and Bombay (“Garbage everywhere, flies, trains that smelled like sweat balloons, open-air pissing and shitting, corruption that could break your spirit in two and then live it in half all over again”) while cooking a recipe his neglected mother taught him and sharing the intensely personal vignette with a TV audience.

Similarly captivating, Irani juggles diverse plot elements — rival gangster restauranteurs in Mumbai, a hollow marriage and the heist of a zoo penguin — to tell the tale of a loss-stricken gangster’s wife’s questionable efforts to feel vital again following the loss of her child.

Set in Greater Vancouver, “The Treasury of Sweetness” and “Behind the Moon” focus on a sweet-shop owner and a restaurant cook, respectively. Both men face unexpected and profound challenges to the realities they’ve built for themselves. Though he devises radically different conclusions for each protagonist, Irani showcases immigrant men with reasonable dreams that are demolished by circumstances from which there seems to be no escape.

The realizations of two other men — a bitter, unemployed, middle-aged divorcee in “Swimming Coach” and a clown vendor at a travelling show in “Circus Wedding” — are wonderfully freeing, but in Irani’s view the clarity has a steep price: Learning an unpleasant truth.

Representing the often agonized musings of an insomniac narrator (“sleep and I have a tumultuous relationship,” he says) who is grappling with a cluster of ideas — orientalism, aboriginality, airports, Tennessee Williams, grief, exile, Hadrian, arrhythmia, our relationship with gluteus muscles, and more yet — late at night while lodging in a Parsi colony in southern Mumbai, the bifurcated title piece and its half truths characterizes Irani as deeply fatigued and struggling to organize or systematize a cluster of thoughts related to identity, place and belonging.

Compared to the elegance, surety and symmetry of the fiction, though, the writer’s struggling comes across with greater visibility than the enlightenment.